how to create a "coffeehouse" style community in an online game?

In a lot of Mmo's and other online games, most talk seems to be about buying/selling items, maybe leveling and xp, or the game, which are all fine and dandy and have their place, but what I would like to see is a game with people who just talk about things, life, the world, ideas, throw some humor in, very casual, sort of like these very forums(and website). how might a game acomplish such a feat?

edited 30th Dec '12 7:19:17 PM by zoraxbrooks

An MMO can't "make" such an atmosphere; that's entirely on the players. Some like to chat about stuff, while others will want to get together with buddies and kill giant ugly demons. Such is the nature of the beast.

I've had good conversations about all manner of things in MMO's before, it's just that the problem with "world chat" or "shout" or whatever it's called in any particular MMO, is that anyone can participate, and the audience tends to be pretty big.

So the odds of a troll messing things up, or someone who has a fanatical position screwing up a good conversation, or just people going "ARGLEBARGLE I SUCK COCKS" because for some reason it isn't ok to have a discussion about IRL things in an MMO is probably the reason for this.

See Also: 14 year old kids.

While I'm sure that many people will respond to this message with "I've had many great conversations through MMO", I'm pretty sure that most people go to such games with the purpose of playing said game. These people are rather focused on playing the game, and would rather not interrupt their crab farming for some idle chit-chat about politics or something.

People that want to talk generally go to internet forums or chatrooms.

One feature that seems to help is "forced downtime". If you have an activity that requires a lot of standing around waiting, then people tend to use that time for discussion.

Star Wars Galaxies originally had a lot of good examples. Players had to visit medical centers and cantinas to heal after fighting for awhile, there was a ten minute wait for shuttles, and at one point having an "image designer" change your character took about ten minutes. Lots of good opportunities for socializing there.

A more straightforward example is the fishing minigame in Gaia Online. It was essentially a chat room connected to a slow paced flash game. Lots of chatting went on there as well.

Incidentally, is this really the right forum for this?

^^

I used to sit around in Everquest in our main auction zone, "Greater Faymart" and have good conversations pretty regularly while I looked for stuff to scoop up and by, or spammed my WTS messages on trade channel.

well where would you have put it? video games seemed all about real games, and i dont think this belongs in worldbuilding, where i usualy post. i can see where your going with forced downtime, its apparent in toribash because only two people play at a time, so everyone else is waiting, conversations do tend to start in larger rooms, which of course have a longer waiting period.

if you cant "make" that kind of atmosphere, then maye one could influence it.

i was thinking to-"shape the community by making it(the game) something that only the kind of people you want to influence the community would want to take part in."(thats what i wrote down, im not too good at quickly describing an idea like that) of course thinking about "kinds of people" tends to be risky.

edited 30th Dec '12 11:45:14 PM by zoraxbrooks

Join a guild of people you like, and use guild chat. :P

I'm not sure if i've seen an MMO without such a thing.

Admittedly, i've only seen like, three of them that specifically have players that like never do anything but that, and even in those typically it's people who simply don't care about the game anymore and just remain hanging out someplace popular.

Good point about forced downtime or leisurely gameplay encouraging general chat. If the game maker wants to encourage general chinwagging he can also reward it, eg. by having debating competitions for ingame prizes. They can also facilitate it by having special off-topic communication channels or areas, 'topics of the day', troll-proofing moderators and so on.

Gamers themselves can help things by having regular conversations in certain places, holding informal debates, playing conversational games etc.

OP immediately made me think of Friendship Is Optimal, which certainly is the only thing I've seen even relating to an actual MMO that doesn't include violence.

edited 31st Dec '12 11:39:04 AM by BlueNinja0

Furcadia is good about this. This is because talking and graphics are really the only functions built in - anything more game-like has to be programmed in by a small set of players. It's a setup that's conducive to roleplaying and socialization.

Second Life doesn't work that way, though. I think this is because there's still a kind of emphasis on point-scoring from the getgo, i.e. making money by customizing graphics and gestures, and because the graphics are realistic enough to be conducive to porn. The barriers to customization are also a lot higher in a three-dimensional world than in an isometric one, and the paucity of custom freeware doesn't help. I guess I didn't get far enough into Second Life to see whether there are niches to be carved out as distinctly as Furcadia's "dreams", but I suspect not.

i like the idea of rewarding players for good conversation, sometimes you just dont think of the most obvious things

perhaps competitions could be held regularly for certain creative content,community participation in event design. the part i find hard is the feeling that i might just be some random dude barging into a group of freinds who dont want to be bothered, so maybe the events would just be held randomly in different city's or have a place with a waiting room(?) where people are picked randomly so everyone is out of their comfort zone, and if they are there then they probobly want to play the game, perhaps improv.which would be judged by other players(?) and everyone would be anonymous. hmm... onine improv games could be good, your team would get no time to prepare...

Best I could think of is a system where you get EXP or some kind of reward for taking time to sit and talk. It would require a system that can actually detect when conversations are happening, where two or more people are actually going back and forth, but it could work. The bonus could be minimal, something you can only max out once per day or something, but enough to encourage players to sit down, take a break, and get away from the game.

Basically a system that watches out for the role players and rewards them for their devotion.

I don't think AI is highly developed enough yet that players would not find easy ways to trick a 'conversation detector'.

That said, it may be highly developed enough that dropping chatbots into the game could have a positive effect. You could hook the conversation detector up to the chatbots, so that they stay quiet if the human players are having a good conversation, but if the humans are quiet or just posting spam then the chatbots start yacking to each other about random topics (which may or may not be related to the game). At the very least this would be sure to generate some humor value, which is one of the few things human players almost invariably feel the need to comment on.

Just an idea...

I can say that I certainly would not pay a subscription fee to join a glorified chatroom. If the gameplay is so tedious that you have no choice but to talk to relieve the boredom, then I would probably go play something else.

The hardest part of building a community is attracting people who are worthwhile to talk to. The larger your subscriber base, the more challenging it becomes to keep off the asshats. Giving the user base self-moderation tools encourages "cliquishness" and makes it hard for new players to join in.

In short, the primary obstacle to doing what you want is the players.

I agree. I played World of Warcraft for a good number of years, and I had lots of great conversations, some of which were waiting for members of the party to show up before a dungeon or raid, other times during the raid or dungeon itself, and other times just sitting around in the city hanging out. Guild chat was also always a good place to just chill out and talk amongst the other guild members. Of course, a lot of those moments were there because people were playing the Auction House or waiting for a dungeon or raid, and didn’t have much else to do than stand around and chat with their guildmates.

But I agree in that I wouldn’t pay any kind of monthly fee for what would amount to a large chat room. When the game stands on its own, the players will make whatever community they want.

Roleplay experience points, as a reward for taking part in the community AND remaining in-character? Could you even fairly score such a thing on a computer game? I know that there's rules for that written into tabletop games, though.

In a tabletop game, the players work with a GM who can individually evaluate their roleplaying and assign RP experience. That's impossible in an MMO; you'd need a massively higher GM to player ratio than any game can afford, or else some kind of AI text parser that is orders of magnitude smarter than anything we've got now.

Certainly, you can constrain player choices via dialog trees, and then come up with some form of reward, but that becomes just another game system to be learned; at no point does it compel human-to-human interaction.

One interesting idea might be to develop a "character personality" builder whereby you can choose how angry, outgoing, playful, etc., your character is, and this then determines dialog options both with NPCs and other players. In other words, the game treats players and NPCs identically and makes you interact with each other in the same manner. You might not even know if you're talking to a PC or NPC at any given time.

For that to work, though, you'd need to either disable chat or have the chat system divorced from the in-game interactions in some way. Maybe you'd have to form a party or guild with players in order to interact with them conversationally, rather than via game mechanics? Forming a party could require that your characters build certain Relationship Values via the dialog system. Your friends would then literally be determined by your character's personality.

To truly make PCs and NPCs indistinguishable, however, you'd need to build a world that doesn't have full freedom of movement, because all you'd need to do to tell them apart would be to see who's behaving in a way that no NPC ever would. Either that or you'd need NPCs programmed for Artificial Atmospheric Actions to make them look like players. Another option would be to have no NPCs at all, only players, but that could get very weird for internal continuity.

edited 4th Jan '13 2:23:54 PM by Fighteer

I would personally think that would feel kind of isolating and annoying after awhile.